From the desk of the Rector Major
At the beginning of the year, the Rector Major of the Salesians proposes a theme (called strenna) to the whole Salesian Family. That tradition goes back to Don Bosco himself. This year Don Pascual Chavez invites us to accept life as a gift and to foster and defend it. Each month under this rubric, the 9th successor of Don Bosco will comment one aspect or another of the theme. When presenting it, Don Chavez expressed himself thus:
“I am proposing to the whole Salesian Family that they allow themselves to be guided by this God who is the lover of life and by His love for life, and to decisively commit themselves to its defence and promotion.
At a time when life is particularly under threat, as the Salesian Family we commit ourselves to:
-accept life with gratitude and with joy as an inviolable gift,
-foster life with passion as a responsible service,
-defend with hope the dignity and the quality of every life, above all the most weak, poor and defenceless.
This Strenna is intended to be “a precise and vigorous reaffirmation of the value of human life and its inviolability, and at the same time a pressing appeal addressed to each and every person, in the name of God: respect, protect, love and serve life, every human life! Only in this direction will you find justice, development, true freedom, peace and happiness!” (John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 5). Acts of the GC, 396.
by Pascual Chávez Villanueva April 2007
LOVING LIFE
THREATS
TO LIFE
“Then the Lord God formed man (Adamà) of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen.2,7). “When they were in the field Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him” (Gen.4,8).
While the first account in Genesis (1,1-2,4a) presents us with God who gives his orders and things happen, and slowly a harmony is built up until it is ready to welcome life, the second presents a God “at work” who seems to reflect and in a more personal tone says to himself “Let us make man in our own image.” So of dust from the ground He formed man (2, 4b-25). If the first helps us appreciate our dignity as creatures formed in God’s image, and therefore inviolable, the second explains our weakness as we are taken from the dust and therefore fragile, almost insubstantial.
The name Adamà/Adam, in fact describes our origin: we are dust. Our life comes from God’s imagination, from his mind and from his heart. The Divine Craftsman with his artist’s hands has created a masterpiece. Psalm 8 proclaims: “How great is your name O Lord, our God, through all the earth … When I see the heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars which you arranged, what is man that you should keep him in mind, mortal man that you care for him? Yet you have made him little less than a god, with glory and honour you crowned him; gave him power over the works of your hand, put all things under his feet.” Life is not only a gift which we receive; it is also a precious and demanding task: caring for it and protecting it from all that could put it at risk. And that this is not an idle threat; we are reminded by the harsh reality of every day, soaked in death and the blood of the dead.
It appears that human life is threatened from its very conception. Such a threat becomes a tragic reality whenever a person is subject to or – more often – provokes the violence of nature (drought, floods, earthquakes, tsunami, fires…) or of history (hunger, thirst, sickness, injustice, corruption, wars…). Things begin to go wrong when man rejects all dependence on his Creator and Father, and then when Cain takes the life of his brother Abel, killing him through jealousy. In this way the multiplication of evil begins and the proliferation of injustice which throw the cosmos into chaos. Nowadays, if on the one hand life is better defended than in the past, in the sense that there is a more mature understanding of the dignity of the human person, on the other it is much more vulnerable as a result of scientific and technological possibilities which reduce it to a product that can be exploited and manipulated. Efforts to make the life of men and women easier through welfare (housing, food, medicine, schooling, employment, communication) are to be appreciated as also the struggle to overcome all forms of slavery, all exploitation and discrimination (social, racial, cultural, religious). At the end of the day we are members of the one “human family.” Nevertheless the killing of Abel reminds us that once we put aside our filial dependence on God, mankind no longer has ethical laws to regulate life because everything becomes relative, opening up the way for any kind of behaviour and sowing the seed for the destruction of humanity itself. Without its fundamental element, it is condemned to a sort of social Darwinism (political, social, economic, cultural, religious discrimination or elimination) between the strongest and the weakest.
Believing in God the lover of life, taking life as a gift and not as a human product, means becoming responsible for one’s own life and that of others, committing oneself totally to life and to what makes it possible, giving one’s own so that all may have life. Immediately after the sin of Adam and Eve, God goes to visit the one he has created and puts a question to him which underlines the responsibility each one has for one’s own life: “Adam, where are you?” (Gen. 3,9). After Cain’s crime, on the other hand, God’s question no longer refers to his own life but to that of his brother: “Cain, where is Abel, your brother?” (Gen. 4,9). From then on the great temptation is to become Cain as far as our brothers are concerned. That is what we become whenever we fail to take seriously the threats against life. It is sacred and ought to be defended, from the moment of conception until the moment of death, with all that that implies, that is, the dignity, the quality and the fulfilment of life.
